High Noon

Though only two of them are famous, there are four Koch brothers, and they are all collectors. David and Charles collect Republican politicians. (Their collection was on display last week in Tampa.) The oldest, Frederick, collects castles in Europe. Their brother Bill collects Old West memorabilia. He owns Sitting Bull’s rifle and Jesse James’s revolver, and he paid $2.3 million for a tintype of Billy the Kid. He owns Old West paintings and Old West ephemera, and, in 2010, he bought an Old West town to house it all. Called Buckskin Joe, the town is an old movie set that was cobbled together by an M-G-M producer in the fifties with log buildings from ghost towns around the West. “True Grit” and “The Cowboys” were filmed there, but its most recent owner had run it as a tourist attraction. When Koch bought the place, it was near Cañon City, Colorado. He had the town—thirty buildings—moved some two hundred miles west, to Bear Ranch, his forty-five-hundred-acre estate outside Somerset, Colorado.

Around the time that buildings were going by on trucks, people in Paonia (population: 1,427), one town over from Somerset, were getting worked up about a new bill being proposed in Congress that would give Koch eighteen hundred acres of public land adjacent to his Western town’s new home. The legislation, called the Central Rockies Land Exchange and National Park System Enhancement Act, of 2010, was a federal land swap, and it was introduced into the House by Representative John Salazar, to whom Koch had donated generously, and who has been hunting on Bear Ranch. In return, Koch would give the federal government nine hundred and ninety acres elsewhere and establish a conservation easement on his new land.

Ed Marston, a retired local journalist, wrote a letter to the Delta County Independent pointing out that the swap would give Koch mineral rights to the acreage, which is believed to be rich in natural gas. He also complained that handing over the land would cut off a public access route to the Ragged Mountain Basin, a scenic wilderness area. Koch’s people responded with a veiled threat: because of all the grumbling, Bear Ranch would henceforth be extra-vigilant against trespassers.

Cut to this summer. Two sessions of Congress have come and gone, but there has been no land swap. Salazar has been voted out of office. Koch has ridden in Paonia’s Cherry Days Parade, on a horse-drawn wagon, clutching a rifle, and been booed. More letters and articles have appeared in the local press about Koch’s ersatz town. “Although this village will look like the Old West, it will lack the essential nature of the West, where people freely rub shoulders with each other and drive or walk past each other’s property,” Marston wrote.

Koch has launched an elaborate counter-offensive, insisting that he isn’t interested in the mineral rights, blanketing Delta County with pro-swap mailers, and putting pro-swap ads on the radio. (“We’re your neighbors, and we’re here to stay.”)

Around town, people who work at Koch’s ranch won’t talk about the land swap. They’ve signed nondisclosure agreements and are familiar with their boss’s habit of suing adversaries. One former employee recounted Koch’s investigation into some fraudulent wine he bought that was said to have been owned by Thomas Jefferson: “He spent five hundred thousand dollars on the wine and five million to find out who fucked him.” Locals think of Koch’s town as part trophy ranch, part corporate retreat. “It’s a schmooze town,” the former worker said. More than fifty building permits have been issued for the town, which has a livery stable, a saloon, a firehouse, and a period hotel.

One recent Sunday, about a hundred locals who oppose the land swap gathered in the Paonia Town Park to encourage people to use the trails on the disputed public land near Koch’s ranch. They passed out illustrated brochures, which urged readers, and perhaps Koch, to “take a hike.”

Marston stood on a chair and addressed the crowd. “Unless we go to the Deep Creek Trail in large numbers, it will be hard to defend that property,” he said. Marston thanked two people from Aspen who were fighting another land swap, proposed by another billionaire. (Both swaps are being promoted by the same lobbying firm, the Western Land Group.) A rancher named Tony Prendergast, who had driven over in a pickup with a bumper sticker that read, “Bite Me,” stepped up to thank Marston, whom he called “the wiliest coyote on the western side of the Rockies.”

There was applause for Hal Brill, a ponytailed developer who had declined to sell land to Koch, and then Tom Chapman, a real-estate broker who has orchestrated lots of land swaps, including an attempted one with Koch, stood up. He had baked a cake for Marston, with whom he used to feud. “We’ve got a committed lefty, environmentalist, liberal, contrarian, public-interest advocate,” Chapman said of Marston. “And I figured, Here’s a man who shouldn’t go through his whole life without having a cake made for him, from scratch, out of a Southern Living cookbook, by a committed far-right, Republican, capitalist, contrarian, private-property advocate.” ♦